DEVELOPMENT OF THE MUTUAL AID AND SUPPORT ON UKRAINIAN LANDS: PECULIARITIES IN THE CONDITIONS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN THE WEST OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The forms of the mutual aid and the support of socially unprotected sections of the population on the Ukrainian lands, on the different historical stages have been analyzed in the article, and also the attention is concentrated on the development of the volunteer movement on the eve and during the First World War in the Western Ukraine. At the different stages, they took the different forms as from the alms to the organizational state support. The directions of the mutual aid and the support of unprotected sections in Kyivan Rus, the Commonwealth Nation and the peculiarities of the assistance to the certain categories of the social groups among the Cossacks have been analyzed. During the First World War, the following organizations were active in the West of Ukraine that gave the assistance to the certain sections of the population as "Women Community" (which was renamed to "the Union of the Ukrainian Women" in 1917), "Samaritan Aid", "the Ukrainian Citizens Committee" (since 1918). We stopped at the youth organization "Plast" (1911), which was built on the moral and the Christian principles. Petro, the son of I. Ya. Franko, wss one of the founders of “Plast”. Among the tasks of "Plast", along with the education of the spirit and the character, was the Samaritan merciful service. The church continued to play the prominent role in the provision of the social assistance in Galicia. It had the great importance in education, it was the initiator and the powerful driver of the national revival. The most prominent philanthropist of the end of the XIX and the first half of the XX centuries was metropolitan Andrii (Roman) Sheptytskyi (1865–1944) in the western Ukrainian lands. Based on the analysis of the sources and the situation of the Ukrainians under the rule of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, we came to the conclusion that the western Ukrainian lands had their own peculiarities. So, the mutual aid to the population during the First World War has been considered taking into account the peculiarities of the territory of the Western Ukraine.